‘I will march with Jack, alone if necessary…’
I’m not massively interested in modern American history so it was Natalie Portman and Spencer director Pablo Larrain that brought me to Jackie. Larrain’s Princess Diana film cast her time in the royal family as a kind of gothic operatic horror film to great effect. Jackie is similar in that it focuses on a woman spiralling out of control due to constant interference from outside elements, but it never hits the heights that Spencer did…
Charting the days following Kennedy’s assassination through the eyes of his wife (Portman), Jackie is a measured and considered meditation on grief, loss and gender. With the rest of the government closing ranks around her, Jackie Kennedy turns to her brother-in-law Robert (Peter Sarsgaard) and her personal secretary Nancy (Greta Gerwig). Elsewhere, there are significant roles for Billy Crudup as an intrepid reporter and John Hurt as a supportive priest.
Jackie is a weird one because it’s beautifully shot (no pun intended), Portman is astonishing and was rightly nominated for an Oscar (eventually losing out to Emma Stone for La La Land) and Sarsgaard is as reliable as ever, and yet the final piece is a little… dull. Portman’s breathy and faithful take on the former First Lady is worth the admission fee alone, as is the incredible final moments where we see Kennedy’s funeral procession intercut with Portman trying to hold her husband’s head together in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, but it’s not enough.
In the end, it feels like Lorrain took all the good stuff from this film and then refined it and improved upon it for Spencer. And so, it probably makes sense just to watch that film instead.